The Internet is full of articles/posts/blogs written by Industry Professionals with endorsement for the top ten or top five screenplay competitions – and it doesn’t take long before you start seeing the same Contests repeated again and again… That makes you feel good about those certain competitions, right? So, you submit your screenplay to some (or all) of those competitions with your fingers crossed… And you might place in the top 10% or better in some, if you’re lucky.
The fact is, in those Blue Chip contests, you are competing with thousands of other screenplays.
But if you are like us, been following screenplay competitions and have submitted to most of them and have won some, you can’t help it but to ask yourself the most important question: WHAT DO WRITERS ACUTALLY GET OUT OF THESE CONTESTS? Some of them have been around for over 25 years; they must have a convincing track record to stay in business, right? Here is from the FAQ of one of the biggest ones out there:
Q: How many Academy Nicholl Fellowship-winning scripts have been produced?
A: Of the 126 scripts that have earned their writers fellowships from 1986 to 2012, 16 have been produced…
Get it? In reality, ALL of the so called TOP screenplay competitions offer the same exact deal: Winners end up with a trophy or a variation of prize money, that’s about it. Very small percentage get to see their work produced and worse if you are an indie/low budget writer, your chances are almost nonexistent.
So what do you do if you are a writer/indie filmmaker like us? The honest truth is unless you have a rich family/investor that is willing to shell out hundreds of thousands of dollars so you can make your Film, there are no options, period. Oh yea, there are a bunch of websites that offer CROWD FUNDING, you can try that. Are you depressed yet?
Don’t be, we are all in the same boat and that’s why we have be working for a long time now to try to come up with a business model that will provide talented indie filmmakers a viable option to make movies. Years ago, PROJECT GREEN LIGHT offered new talents a platform to compete but it was short lived for obvious reasons, the business model didn’t work. The movies lost money. Unlike all of these different platforms that had good intentions in helping discover new talent, at YOUPIX.ORG, we have eliminated many mistakes to dramatically increase the odds of success for this new indie platform.
The purpose of this blog is not to attack or trash other contests, not at all. The majority of them are run by decent people and for legitimate reasons. The point of this blog is to offer writers/indie filmmakers a different option to help them get to their ultimate goal – make movies. That’s why OUR best screenplay competition for indie FILMMAKERS is: YouPix.org…that’s right. Where WINNERS ACTUALLY MAKE A REAL MOVIE! If you like the sound of that join our exciting new community at www.youpix.org.